1. Ubisoft Montreal's Clint Hocking, fresh from Far Cry 2's positive critical reception, discusses 'Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation', discussing "how game systems can be designed to encourage the player to improvise and recover from incremental failures and set-backs."

6.Far Cry 2 narrative designer Patrick Redding has a 20-minute lecture called 'Aarf! Arf Arf Arf: Talking to the Player with Barks', identifying "...both common pitfalls and practical solutions that keep NPCs sounding smart." (This is in addition to a previously highlighted 60-minute lecture on 'Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games'.)
7. Lionhead's Peter Molyneux (Populous, Fable series) is presenting a special lecture called 'Lionhead Experiments Revealed' including prototypes of "a range of ideas which are bubbling under the surface at Lionhead Studios which may or may not make it into full games."

11. Former Maxis developer and Spore Creature Creator lead designer Chaim Gingold presents an intriguing design discussion in the form of 'The Human Play Machine', analyzing "how existing game genres map onto the human brain and body, and how our design decisions affect who will be attracted to our games, and how they will play."

15. Harmonix's Dan Teasdale rocks out with 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band, discussing the series and why "yearly sequels and design innovation arguably don't mix", but the Boston-based team has strived to accomplish this.
16. Discussing Volition's Saints Row 2, Scott Phillips presents 'Breathing LIFE into an Open World', in which attendees "will learn about the inspiration, organization, methodology, successes and failures of the LIFE system used to add life to the open world city of Stilwater."

17. As recently highlighted, the latest iteration of the Eric Zimmerman-organized Game Design Challenge is 'The Game Design Challenge: My First Time', with Portal's Kim Swift, Habbo's Sulka Haro and Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky all participating in a challenge to create "a concept that brings together two unexplored themes for games: sex and autobiography."

18. The fourth in a popular and long-running GDC lecture series, 'Game Studies Download 4.0' sees : Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal, and Mia Consalvo present "the 10 most surprising and relevant [academic] insights for game designers and developers" published this year.

Keynote Announced: Hideo Kojima, Head of Kojima ProductionsHideo Kojima"Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible"
Thursday, March 26, 10:30am-12pm

Known for giving rise to the stealth action game genre with his creation of the acclaimed Metal Gear series more than two decades ago, Kojima’s keynote will focus on conquering various development obstacles with creative game design, using the driving game design philosophies behind the Metal Gear series as reference. The address, “Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible,” marks Kojima’s debut appearance at the GDC. Keynote Announced: Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo
Iwata"Discovering New Development Opportunities"
Wednesday, March 25th, 9-10am

Synopsis:
The development of both Nintendo DS and Wii was based on the idea that the video game consumer base could be broadened if the definition of a video game…and ways to access games…were viewed differently. The fact that these platforms have been accepted so enthusiastically around the world shows that there is opportunity for developers to stretch the boundaries of what was previously viewed as possible in terms of realizing a creative vision.

In his keynote address, Nintendo global president Satoru Iwata will talk about Nintendo’s role in creating better tools and bringing opportunities for developers to introduce their innovative ideas to a marketplace that is increasingly willing and eager to embrace new game design possibilities.

Description:
Neil Young, CEO and founder, ngmoco, will bring the classic game makers perspective to the GDC Mobile keynote and talk about why, to his own surprise, he left his role at Electronic Arts to build a new class of mobile games. He will share with the audience his learnings and draw a vision for the not-so-distant future, and the opportunities the new mobile devices present, to inspire developers to leave their day jobs too.

Staff Member

Taming Your Game Production Demons: The Offset ApproachTHURSDAY, MARCH 26
Time and cost are the demons that plague every game. We have created a content-centered development team, focusing on tools that magnify the impact of each individual artist and remove barriers to creativity. Offset’s editor and engine, still in production, are being designed and developed from the ground up to enable fast iteration with a WYSIWYG interface for optimal artist efficiency. In this presentation we will share the steps (and some missteps!) we took to give our artists the tools they need to tame the demons of their production pipeline.Presented by Remi Arnaudand Ian Lewis.

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Demonstração do CryEngine 3:

Crytek is excited to announce that they will introduce their latest all-in-one game development solution CryENGINE 3, at this year's GDC Expo (March 25th - 27th) in San Francisco.

CryENGINE 3 is the first development platform for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, MMO, DX9/DX10 that also is truly Next-Gen-Ready - with scalable computation and graphics for all major upcoming platforms. It provides the complete game engine to create AAA quality next generation games, and includes the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox level editor, a production-proven, 3rd generation "What you see is what you play" (WYSIWYP) - tool designed by and for professional developers. CryENGINE 3 comes with significant new features specifically designed for console, online, MMO and Next-Gen game development.

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Apresentação do Larrabee:

Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions (LRBni) in Action
Speaker: Michael Abrash (Rad Game Tools)

"For years, Michael Abrash has been teaching the games industry about the latest and most important technical developments. If it's new, if it matters, you can be sure that he'll be there first, lighting the way. In short: if Michael Abrash cares about it, you should too. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see first-hand what everyone will be talking about tomorrow."

The Game Developers Conference has been voted the most important event on the busy industry calendar, with over 40 per cent of those surveyed by GamesIndustry.biz labelling the San Francisco show as essential.

The annual developers conference beat E3, the show once considered the industry's glitzy showcase, but which has spent the past two year's struggling with an identity crisis that left it down-sized and lacking inspiration.

With less than three weeks to go to GDC 2009, conference director Meggan Scavio has said that its testament to the passion of the developers themselves that some are making the journey despite budget cut-backs during a tough year.
"I feel pretty honoured to act as host to what many consider a focal point of their year," said Scavvio, speaking exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz.

13. An all-star panel called 'Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, Eastern and Western Game Design" features Fallout 3's Emil Pagliarulo alongside ICO/Shadow Of The Colossus' Fumito Ueda and No More Heroes' Suda51 talking about trends and the future in open-world game design.

Staff Member

San Francisco, March 23, 2009 – Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced today that PhyreEngine™ 2.40, the latest version of the popular games development framework, has been released to PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3®) game developers and publishers, capping a successful year since its initial announcement at GDC 2008.

PhyreEngine is a graphics rendering engine provided under a license that allows it to be used by any PS3 game developers and publishers as well as Tools & Middleware licensees in their products. The engine uses sophisticated parallel processing techniques that are optimized for the Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU) of the Cell Broadband Engine™ of the PS3, but can be easily ported to other multi-core architectures. As a result, PhyreEngine has been newly-adopted by dozens of game studios in the last year, now appearing each month on the PlayStation®Store or on Blu-ray Discs.

Some of the more recent developers and publishers to adopt PhyreEngine include (in alphabetical order):

* Australian developer Big Ant Studios. Ross Symons, their CEO added “PhyreEngine has cut down Big Ant’s development time significantly while allowing us to fully harness the power of the PS3. PhyreEngine has given us the opportunity to focus less on tech and more on creating good games.”

* UK-based studio Doublesix Games, whose game Burn Zombie Burn will be released in Europe and North America later this month. Jonathan Hobson, Lead Programmer, commented that “PhyreEngine allowed Doublesix Games to begin development of our first game Burn Zombie Burn immediately and rapidly, without initial financial outlay or dedicated tech development time. It is a neat blend of clever, high-performance code that the SCE tech teams are famous for, with a modern, well designed, and easy to use set of interfaces and tools. In a matter of weeks we had hundreds of animated zombies running around at a fairly solid frame rate. The extensive set of sample code meant that we always had an idea of how to do things and on the rare occasions that we didn’t, the PhyreEngine support team was fantastic.”

* Bristol, UK-based studio FluffyLogic, whose PlayStation®Network title Savage Moon was released in December 2008 in European regions and January 2009 in North America. Will Bolam, FluffyLogic’s Director of Technology noted that “PhyreEngine was a great solution for FluffyLogic during work on our first PS3 title Savage Moon - loads of useful components we could use straight away to get the game up and running, easily extensible during development of game-specific code and great support from the PhyreEngine team.”

* Tokyo-based studio Game Republic recently released Catan using PhyreEngine in Japan.

* Famous Japanese studio IREM published PachiPara DL (DownLoad) Hyper Sea Story In Karibu in July 2008 in Japan.

* Bulgarian studio Ivent Games, who are developing the third-person action game Strength of the Sword. Georgi Rakidov, Lead Programmer, commented “I see PhyreEngine as a complete game engine suitable for all types of games. The support is just outstanding, with a nice balance between improving old features and adding new ones – most recently the terrain and the foliage utilities.”

* New French studio Lexis Numérique whose PS3 title Brooklyn Stories (working title) is currently in development.

* New Portuguese studio Seed Studios, whose real-time strategy game Under Siege will be released later this year. Lead designer, Bruno Ribeiro, noted “PhyreEngine enabled us to rapidly prototype our game and provided a solid and efficient foundation to explore the potential of the PS3.”

* New Paris, France-based studio Spiders working on their as-yet-unsigned RPG/Action disc-based game Mars.

* US studio thatgamecompany, who released Flower in North America and Europe in February 2009. Their lead programmer, John Edwards commented, “Flower is thatgamecompany’s second game using PhyreEngine and it won’t be the last. Support is friendly and responsive and the code is mature to the point where you just download, build and go. PhyreEngine’s suit of PS3-optimized utilities lets us spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time making games.”

* VectorCell, Paul Cuisset’s new studio, whose PS3 title The 7th Seal (working title) is currently in development.

During the last year, a range of new fully functional “game templates” were released, including support for Havok Complete XS™, NVIDIA PhysX™ and Bullet for physics, making it even easier for game teams to kick-start their development process. In addition, a host of white papers have been made available describing the techniques used within PhyreEngine, helping a broader community of game developers to improve and extend the features of their proprietary game engine code.

Staff Member

Why oh why did I agree to host the Game Developers Choice Awards again? So much stress! I lay awake at night, thinking about all those people staring at me from the audience, growling. I try to imagine them in their underwear, but have you ever tried imagining the games industry in its underwear? That’s not helping me sleep at night.

“I know what you need,” said Klint, our web tyrant.

“Yes! I need a few jokes for my script. Hopefully about Game Audio, Design, or—“

“No, what you need is for someone to tell your story, in GAME FORM, for the benefit of future generations.”

“But how’s that going to help me with—“

“Shhhhh,” Klint said, moving my hand to my mouse. “I’ve tried to present your problem in a form that would make you feel more relaxed and comfortable. As if it were a puzzle to solve from a simpler time, when your brain was younger and more flexible.”